The pimple hat

joerookery

joerookery

Well-known member
You have to read this description.

http://cgi.ebay.com/Germany-Pickelhaube-Officer-Spiked-Helmet-Parade-WWI-1_W0QQitemZ310034447062
 
When "Pickelhaube" is copied into some on-line translators, it comes out as "pimple hood" for some reason. I get some very strange e-mails from people using on-line translators.......
 
But I think the ebay seller is perfectly right, gentlemen! As far as I know the real meaning, for Germans, of the familiar term "Pickelhaube" is indeed pimple hat. "Pickel" does not refer to "spike", as many people erroneously believe...
Bruno
 
I agree with Bruno. My old High School edition of Putnam's Contemporary German Dictionary provides this definition:

Pickel nm (-) pimple; see also Picke;—ig a pimply.

Berkley Publishing Corporation, Eleventh Printing © 1981

Chas.
 
Actually "Pickelhaube" evolved from "Beckenhaube" which is a medival helmet - a fact wich most people in Germany would not know either ("Pickel" can also mean sort of a spiked axe and on fist look that seems so self-evident as an eponym). But pimple hat is a neat translation too :D.
 
Heren,

Het is wat het is: "Pickelhaube" kan alleen maar vertaald worden zoals het is: helm (desgewenst de wellicht correctere vertaling "kap") met punt. Alle andere spookverhalen lijken mij volkomen overbodig.

Groeten uit NL.
HW
 
I have always regarded Pickelhaube as a colloquialism. Looking through a copy of the 1913 Deutscher Offizier-Verein Armeemarinehaus catalogue, spiked helmets are called, quite simply, helmets (Helm, or the plural, Helme).

The catalogue also features, by name, Tschakos, Pelzmützen, and Tschapkas, but the term, Pickelhaube, appears nowhere.

As for the eBay helmet, it is an eccentric collection of parts, including an infantry style Helm and JzP spike base.

Chas.

[ADMN UPDATE. PLEASE SEE THIS 2022 THREAD] https://www.pickelhaubes.com/xf/thr...oduction-of-the-pickelhaube-in-prussia.15189/
 
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I asked Paul von McKeown, a friend of mine in Germany who is bilingual in German and English and owns a superb collection of Pickelhauben . Here is his comment, suggesting that I was half-right:

Haube means literally "bonnet" or headdress of some sort, and pickel is "pimple", or can also be "pick" as in 'Eispickel'. But I think everyone would associate this word with 'spike' or 'Spitze'. Spike in German would be 'Spitze', which is the correct term for that part of the helmet, 'Spitzenhals', 'Spitzenteller', 'Kreuzblatt' would be synonym or related to this. Just looking in my French dictionary, (my English dictionary I gave to a friend in Berlin several years ago!) under 'Picke' (Spitzhacke) = pioche; Pickel = piolet, bouton. But of course, in the official army Jargon of the time nobody said "Pickelhaube", not officially, but simply "Helm" or "Lederhelm" to differenciate from the 'Stahlhelm' of the cuirassiers.

Bruno
 
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